


BOHICA

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:04:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton, in transition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	BOHICA

For the better part of fifteen years, archery is a hobby because when the Army said that they wanted Clint to know how to shoot everything, they meant firearms, things with bullets and missiles and grenades, things that require combustion and gunpowder and make noise and heat. So Clint learns and he learns well, getting used to the sore shoulder from the stock of his rifle, to the tinkle of hot casings from belt-fed machine guns, to the way life looks different and strange through telescopic sights and night vision optics.

His quiver does not get dusty, though, at least when he’s in garrison. The bow and arrow remains his touchstone, his meditation, his whatever it is that he needs it to be for him to find his center in the middle of the casual insanity that is Army life. After growing up with very few rules that couldn’t be broken, the regimentation of the Army is initially hard to take -- the drill sergeants had their work cut out for them breaking him to the bit – and never gets less than suffocating or starts to make any more sense. The only difference is that he gets good enough that he gets further and further away from where it matters and gets himself instead to where the wet-behind-the-ears lieutenants and petty dictator sergeant majors can’t play their power games, where common sense is not made slave to regulations, where the only brass he ever sees is casings and not rank insignia.

But while you can run from Big Army, you can’t hide, so when Fury asks him if he wants to move over to the other side of the inter-agency group they’ve been working on together for the last eight months, Clint doesn’t lie when he says he’ll think about it. The working group – codenamed Level Flame right now, but that’ll change in two months – has been actually working, since Fury somehow has the ability to repel any and all bureaucratic bullshit without getting everyone else splattered in brown. They have been taking down HVTs at a decent clip, churning out actionable intel and then _acting on it_ , which is not something to take for granted. Clint has spent a lot of time watching opportunity race by while waiting for orders to move.

Fury is easy to work for so long as you do your job (and Clint is very good at doing his job) because he doesn’t give a fuck about any of the things great commanders don’t give a fuck about and cares a whole lot about what’s actually important. He’s ruthless at weeding out people he doesn’t like or doesn’t trust (they tend to be the same people) and even harder on those he actually wants around. He expects you to constantly prove yourself to him and Clint is maybe a little surprised at how easily – eagerly – he goes along with that. But not really because everyone else is drinking from the same Kool-Aid; Level Flame is full of smug bastards racing each other for a chance to bask in the glow of Fury’s sharp-edged approval. It’s incredibly satisfying to feel well-used, to know that you’re not being sent off on a bullshit mission that someone cooked up to look good, to have faith in your intel and support and the people around you. And for a sniper like Clint, it’s a fucking relief because his kind of work doesn’t allow for an “oops” factor. It’s what a lot of them got into the service thinking it would be like, a notion they’d been disabused of by the time basic ended and their real military career began. Which is why so many who enlist don’t re-up; why put up with this bullshit at this pay rate when you can do it in the private sector for better pay and less chance of getting your parts blown off?

But Clint’s stubborn and maybe not that bright and he’s got almost fifteen years in the service, which means he’s got five to go before he can retire – if that’s what he wants to do, which he’s not sure it is, despite it all. Which in turn means that quitting now to follow Fury over to his shady agency would be bad for his long-term plans, such as they are. He’s not going to be doing this (for whatever values of “this,” which he doesn’t think will be that different over on Fury’s side of the lawn) forever and there’s going to be an “after” he needs to think about on the off chance his military career doesn’t end with a caisson and 21-gun salute. He grew up with nothing, no savings, no security, and the idea of a pension – even the Army’s, which is okay but nothing to retire to the Riviera on – is so huge to him, so important because it will be something he can rely on. He’s got no civilian job skills, no real idea of how to live like a civilian, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to hack it out there once he does retire, be it after twenty years or thirty-five. A pension means he has a little bit of a safety net for when it comes time to cross that high wire. He can’t lose it.

Which is why he tells Fury to talk to him in five years and four months, if the offer’s still open.

Fury talks to him in twenty-six days, which is how long it took for Fury to secure a kind of permanent loan of Master Sergeant Barton, one that will ensure that Clint continues to accrue time in service while not actually _being in the service_.

“You’ll never be promoted,” Fury warns him.

“Do I look like I ever want to be a sergeant major?” Clint replies.

Fury gives him a wolf’s grin. “Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Barton.”

* * *

Agent Barton, unlike Master Sergeant Barton, has better things to do than sit around in CENTCOM’s AO performing rifle maintenance, cleaning and use. Fury has _plans_ for him.

But first Clint has to go to spy kindergarten. SHIELD doesn’t have its own yet, so he goes through the CIA’s because the Agency, like the Army, doesn’t apply the lacquer of stupidity and CYA until later on in the process and so the Farm’s still got useful training even if almost every senior agent Clint’s ever met is a jackass. Clint’s not the only ex-military type there, not the only SHIELD candidate there, and they tend to stick together because spending too much time around the children – the young, earnest types and the wannabe James Bonds – hurts their brains. The vets are jaded and jocular, their bullshit meters more finely calibrated so that they can better judge what’s actually important from what they have to learn anyway because the instructors think it’s important.

There’s an archery range at the Farm. It’s supposed to be for one of the ritual humiliation exercises – cocky baby agents are unlikely to even hit the target, let alone bullseye it – but Clint doesn’t bother to pretend he’s other than what he is and, soon enough, he’s got special privileges to use it during his free time.

Coulson, the guy SHIELD sends to the Farm to keep track of their erstwhile ducklings, asks to be given a demonstration one day. Clint’s pretty sure this is just for the circus thrill, but Coulson’s a nice guy for a suit and Clint is still a circus performer at heart and so he says sure.

He’s maybe not prepared for Coulson’s questions afterward about whether he’d consider using the bow in the field or whether he’d be interested in specialty arrows.

“The last fifty years of armed conflict can be boiled down to the guys with slingshots making clean victory impossible for the guys with rifles,” Coulson replies with a shrug after Clint expresses his disbelief. “Why not learn from their example instead of just trying to build better rifles?”

Also, Coulson explains, there are tactical and logistical advantages to not using a rifle. Clint, who has spent a lot of years dragging twenty pounds of M24 (plus kit) around, does not disagree.

Clint doesn’t get to carry a quiver on his first mission as a proper SHIELD agent, nor his second, nor his fifth. Because Fury’s plans for him involve more than sniping.

“We have enough trigger pullers,” Coulson explains to him. Coulson has graduated, too, from personnel management to Clint’s handler. Or maybe that was always the plan and Fury thought they should start the relationship in the cradle. “You are capable of much more. We’re trying to find out how much.”

Clint recognizes the challenge and accepts it. Revels in it, a little. At least until the first time he has to run for his life because maybe he’d gotten a little too cocksure and has to do half a klick on a busted ankle because of a bad jump off of a fourth-story roof followed by sliding awkwardly after stepping into a giant mound of shit because Parisians don’t curb their fucking dogs.

Nonetheless, a childhood of carny tricks, pickpocketing, and light B&E has never been better preparation for paying government work. Clint surprises everyone, even himself, with how good he is at the parts of tradecraft that don’t involve killing people. Everyone already knows how good he is at _that_.

The quiver comes out first at the proving grounds near Mattituck, which is so far out on Long Island that it might as well be a suburb of Reykjavik and is just as isolated from prying eyes. Hiding out there is Clint’s personal Q, whose real name is Yang but actually likes it better when Clint makes the Bond reference. (And likes him best when Clint starts bringing food from either Flushing or Chinatown.) Yang has combined his appetite for destruction with his fancypants engineering degrees and ten years working for Stark Industries to become the geekiest armorer Clint has ever met. (The other advantage of Mattituck being three hours from Manhattan is that the uniform regs are completely ignored; Clint shows up one time to find Yang wearing Spock ears because it was _Star Trek_ Day. Clint politely declines Yang’s extra set.)

Yang spent his years at Stark working on missile systems, so he’s already an expert on payloads and how they affect flight path. Arrows are a level up for him because they’re finickier, more reliant on environment and human skill and there’s so much more that can be done with them.

Which is not to say that Yang doesn’t dance with the girl that brung him. Yang gives him exploding arrows, then even better exploding arrows, then arrows with timers he can set before they explode, then improves those, too. There are also arrows that work as flares, arrows that work as CS gas grenades (they ditch those because the real ones are just fine and Clint would rather use the quiver space on other things), arrows that make the most awful high-pitched noises, arrows that can be fitted with cartridges that carry poisons or antidotes or tranquilizers or hallucinogenics. There is a grappling arrow that Clint refuses to test until the third version because he has sincere doubts about the tensile strength of the rappelling line; it takes until the fifth version before he isn’t dropped from a height when it suddenly gives out. There is an arrow that sings Happy Birthday that he saves for Coulson, who is spending the day in Virginia requalifying at the range and other boring HR-mandated tasks in the misguided belief that his agents won’t figure out where he is or why the day is important.

Coulson sends him to Somalia for that, although he pretends it’s because Clint did a few Foreign Internal Defense stints there once upon a time. But he gets to bring the quiver and empty it, sending back encrypted emails to Yang about what worked and what didn’t and can he have a few more of those dog-whistle arrows because they work even better on feral dogs than the put-upon mutts at Mattituck. And because while Clint’s made his peace with ending human lives when necessary, he’s never been comfortable with killing animals that don’t understand why they’re at risk in the first place.

* * *

Clint graduates from spy-versus-unsuspecting-terrorist-rube to spy-versus-spy sometime in his second year with SHIELD, right around when he starts wondering if he’s going back to Afghanistan because things are devolving there (again). But instead of freezing his ass off running around mountains like the goat that he ain’t, he finds himself in a race to find some radioactive goop before the bad guys do. Except this time the bad guys aren’t AK-toting dudes with bad hygiene and worse dental coverage working for drugs or because some crackpot mullah told them that sex slavery and child-killing is totally in the Koran, but actual serious former intelligence operatives now working freelance for even more serious amounts of cash.

And, it turns out, the bad guys aren’t even _guys_. Anatomically speaking, since he’s seen more than his fair share of grown men acting like six-year-old girls lost at the fair.

Natasha Romanova lets him live the first time they meet because she can’t believe her competition is carrying a quiver.

“I will not kill Robin Hood,” she tells him as she leaves him lying on the concrete floor of a warehouse in Trieste, a knife in his thigh and a cut in his forehead that keeps flooding his eye with blood. She’s holding his Glock in her hand. “Even a bad Robin Hood such as you.”

She’d beaten the crap out of him before she stabbed him in the leg and he can’t do more than wheeze at her. He might have a rib poking at his lung; he’s too winded for it to be simply exhaustion. He can’t do more than make a face and stick out his tongue. The last thing he hears before he passes out is her laughter.

He comes to in a hospital bed at Aviano Airbase, where he’s told that he is recovering from a concussion, a collapsed lung, three cracked ribs, a deep thigh laceration (“I had a fucking three inch blade in there and that’s what you call it?”), and some minor scrapes that Coulson, who is there at his bedside, assures will only give him a rakish charm until they heal. Coulson also tells him that Romanova called them to pick Clint up.

“I think she likes you,” Coulson says helpfully, settling back into his chair and picking up his book. “The Black Widow isn’t usually that compassionate.”

The second time they meet, Clint puts an arrow in her thigh exactly where she stabbed him because they are meeting on _his_ terms, from sixty-three meters away (and seven meters up) with negligible wind speed and no need to do more than breathe to aim true. He uses the arrow that plays ‘Have a Holly Jolly Christmas’ because it’s December and Yang said it was either this or ‘Feliz Navidad.’ And then he drops an arrow loaded with a paralytic agent because he knows that the arrow in her leg won’t actually stop her. He takes what he came for – a flash drive containing proof that the North Koreans are helping the Syrians build a nuclear facility – and then returns to her, where she still lies, awake and unable to move. He reclaims his Glock – a custom job by one of the other nerds at Mattituck, no surprise that she was carrying it – and leaves her a bottle of water after moving her head to make sure she can breathe easily until motor function returned.

“You’re an even shittier Maid Marion,” he tells her. He doesn’t call her people because if he could call her people, SHIELD would have busted their asses already because they are Very Bad Men.

The third time they meet, those Very Bad Men are trying to blow them both up, something that Clint doesn’t realize initially. He’s gotten better at the spy-versus-spy stuff, a lot better, but this isn’t spy-versus-spy. It’s spy-versus-a-fucking-army and he’s really wondering if he gets out of this one alive when he runs into the Widow, who underneath the pissed-off expression kind of looks like she’s wondering the same thing. Although he doesn’t realize that initially either because his first reaction to _literally_ running into her is to wonder what he did to deserve dealing with her on top of everything else currently going CATFU on him at the moment.

And then she tells him to move or else they’re both dead. Twice, because the first time doesn’t really penetrate. So she pushes him and he moves and the two of them fight their way through an army of ex-Spetsnaz and KMZ (current or former, it’s hard to tell with all of the black outfits). It takes both of their skill sets and an unbelievable amount of luck for them to get to safety, especially once the chase continues on to the streets of Pest and they have civilians and then police to dodge.

“Why are your own people trying to kill you?” he asks.

The Widow – Natasha, she stopped being a code name sometime in the first ten minutes of their joint flight – doesn’t answer for a long moment, enough for him to think that she won’t.

“Because they were collecting little girls,” she finally says. “Beautiful little girls. And I took away their collection.”

Natasha drives like a maniac, which under the circumstances is acceptable. While he hangs out the broken passenger-side window and fires arrows at their pursuers, Clint tells Coulson over his radio that they need an extraction right the fuck now. Coulson asks who the ‘we’ is, but the answer isn’t time-sensitive and, besides, there are multiple people shooting automatic weapons at them in the middle of a major city and Clint is down to his last two arrows and one of them plays showtunes.

Natasha gets them away from the Danube, out of the downtown, and almost all of the way to the extraction point before she pulls over. “This is where you get out,” she tells him.

“Aren’t you tired of this shit?” he asks her, not budging. “Also, this is my getaway car.”

Natasha gives him a look and Clint wonders if she’s going to hit him; they’re both out of ammo, so she can’t pull out a gun and do anything more than clock him with it.

“We’re running from your people,” he reminds her. “People that are trying to kill you and that you are probably going to turn around and go kill. My people are just over there—“ he gestures to where the ugly little car is sitting on the next hill, headlights flashing the all-clear sign again. “And I’m running _toward_ them because they want to save my life. Yours, too, if you’d let them. And if you gave them half a chance, they’d probably help you go kill your people, too.”

For a guy who has had it pointed out to him on many occasions that he’s really shit at reading women, he can read Natasha like a large-print book right now. He can see the temptation on her face, see the exhaustion that has only some to do with the joyride they’ve just been on, and he can see, underneath it all, the pain. He knows she won’t say yes and he knows why.

“You gotta learn to trust someone, Natochka,” he tells her, opening up the car door. “We’re not all here to betray you.”

“I don’t need to be rescued,“ she bites off angrily. But it’s not all anger at him and it makes him smile.

“You don’t,” he agrees, getting out of the car. “But as good as you are on your own, you could be so much more if you weren’t.”

He closes the door behind him, shoulders the quiver, and waves to the agent waiting on the next hill so that he doesn’t get shot by his own people. He doesn’t tell Natasha that his car is tagged, but he also knows that SHIELD will lose her pretty quickly because the car looks like it’s been through a war zone and she’ll need to ditch it.

The fourth time they meet, it’s at an outdoor café in Tel Aviv too early in the morning for both of them. They eat shakshuka and salad and drink pot after pot of coffee strong enough to melt gold and he doesn’t ask why she requested the meeting. They talk about killing for your country, a topic Clint has historically steadfastly refused to discuss with anyone who hasn’t done it, and the kind of bullshit and lies and little betrayals and not so little betrayals that go along with being what they are. He doesn’t make a point of distinguishing between what he does with the sanction of his government and what she does as a mercenary; in many ways, it’s functionally equivalent and at least nobody waves a flag in her face while they screw her around. He doesn’t pretend that SHIELD is perfect, that he’s always doing the noble thing, that there aren’t days –weeks – when he doesn’t hate himself for what he’s done and then hate himself even more for not stopping doing it. She knows; the Red Room was exponentially more fucked up than the Farm, but it was based on the same ideas. You sell your soul when you accept the king’s shilling; the question is how much of it you steal back.  

“Is the offer still open?” she asks as they are presented with a fruit plate the size of Guatemala.

“Sure,” he replies, since while Fury’s not very excited (to put it mildly) about the idea of bringing the Black Widow in from the cold, everyone else is turning cartwheels and if the price is only to knock off a posse of oligarchs and crime lords, then it’ll be a bargain.

The fifth time they meet, it’s for a briefing and she’s his partner. Or he’s hers. They never quite agree on that.

* * *

“Coulson’s being weird.” Natasha drops down across from where Clint is very carefully arranging the contents of his plate to make Frito pie. SHIELD’s been big enough for a while now to have stupid rules that rival every other government institution, so he’d been unable to convince the hot station server to put the chili in the Fritos bag since apparently he was breaking the rules by opening the bag in the first place. So he now has to improvise, which completely defeats the purpose of comfort food in the first place.

“Define ‘weird,’” Clint replies as he prepares to shovel chili from the bowl it was issued to him in to the bowl he’s carefully lined with Fritos and cheese. “Is this general weird or just you being all rabbity?”

Just because the Black Widow is working on the side of the angels now doesn’t mean she’s ready to trust those angels as far as she can throw them. She’s not paranoid per se and there’s nothing the least bit off about her in the field, but in-house her sense of self-preservation is still working on overdrive more than two years into her SHIELD career and sometimes she forgets that a cigar is often just a cigar when it comes to their bosses. Coulson generally just rolls with it because he’s Coulson and he rolls with everything and he didn’t even blink the first time she drew a weapon on him because she thought he was pulling a gun out of his desk drawer instead of a stapler.

“General weird,” she clarifies, sneaking a Frito out of his carefully designed base and he hisses at her because she’s created an escape route for the chili. Natasha, most of the time, recognizes that she sometimes sees threats that aren’t there. The rest of the time, Clint rolls with it, too. “He’s kind of creepily good-humored.”

Clint pauses in his careful application of chili to base and looks up at her and she shrugs, popping her stolen Frito into her mouth. “Maybe he just got laid,” he suggests.

Coulson likes to pretend that he eats, sleeps, and breathes SHIELD business, but they both know that Coulson’s got a life away from the job. Which doesn’t mean that Clint didn’t do a double-take the first time he saw Coulson in jeans and a t-shirt, just that he can appreciate that Coulson likes to keep his private life private.

“It’s not that,” Natasha dismisses. “I know what he looks like then.”

Clint whimpers. “Please don’t tell me how you know, how I might know at some future point, or under what circumstance you acquired this knowledge. In fact, let’s pretend you never said anything. Can we start this conversation again? This time with a different melody?”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “They’re going to make another play at Stark, I think.”

Clint cocks an eyebrow because his mouth is full and Natasha has a serious thing about talking with your mouth full.

“Just to consult or something,” she clarifies, her tone and expression clearly stating what she thinks of _that_ idea. It took her weeks to come down off that bitch-session high after she finished up her tenure as Natalie Rushman. “The theory being that a tiny bit of Tony Stark brilliance will be better than none at all.”

Clint swallows and shrugs. “He’s got his uses.”

Natasha glares at him and he pretends not to notice. Her dislike of the idea has nothing to do with the possibility of spending more time in close proximity to Stark; that part is done and she knows it. What she’s actually pissed about is the possibility – probability – that Fury is panting after Stark even now, even after all of the damage he’s done, after how out of control and untrustworthy he’s shown himself to be. The same Fury who spent the first year of Natasha’s SHIELD tenure making it very clear that he didn’t want her around, didn’t trust her, and was waiting for her to screw up so he could send the dogs after her even as she’d shown herself to be loyal and open to SHIELD in return. Fury’s over it now, obviously, and he pretends he was never under it, but the irony of him sending Natasha, of all people, to seduce Stark into working for them had galled her. Galled Clint, too, and he’d said something to Coulson about it, but they both agreed that there was nothing to actually be done about it and Natasha was a big girl and could get over her insecurities herself. Except Clint knew that it wasn’t that simple. Coulson did, too.

“So does nitroglycerin,” Natasha retorts.

The conversation gets interrupted permanently by one of the probationary agents standing on a table and singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time” at the top of his lungs, accompanied by three probies as dancers. It’s apparently the end of the probationary cycle and the little proto-agents are being put through their last paces of ritual humiliation by their mentors. Clint is grateful once again that he never had to go through that shit; he might’ve shot someone.

Clint runs into Coulson completely by accident later on in the afternoon – Clint’s taking the long way around to avoid running into the Direct Action Service commander he pissed off in the Philippines, Coulson’s doing whatever it is Coulson does when he’s not agent-wrangling and, yeah, Nat’s not wrong. Coulson definitely has a spring in his step.

“You win an eBay auction on a Captain America figurine or something?” Clint asks him, entirely unseriously. Coulson’s not a collector of Cap memorabilia, not a serious one at any rate, but it’s one of the few personal things Clint knows about the man, so it’s what he goes for and Coulson knows he doesn’t mean anything by it.

Or he usually does because Clint doesn’t miss the flash of _something_ on Coulson’s face before Coulson gives him a laugh that’s intentionally weak but also a little forced.

It’s a week before Clint realizes why.

“They found Captain America livery,” Natasha texts him one night. Well, night for him, since he’s in Japan. He’s about to go out to dinner with the other agents he’s working with, but this stops him halfway down the hall to the elevator and he’s ready to turn back into his room so he can call her because even if it’s just a shirt or maybe even the shield itself, this is fucking _huge_. No wonder Coulson was all floaty.

“Argh! Autocorrect. ALIVE,” is Natasha’s next text and Clint does turn and go back to his room, dialing Natasha’s phone before he even keys open the door because What. The. _Fuck_?

Natasha fills him in obliquely, since she’s still on the Helicarrier and this is news that’s so top secret the two of them might never be officially told. Apparently they found Cap’s plane in the ice and, in the plane, they found the man himself. They cut him out of the ice and were apparently already planning the official announcement and state burial in Arlington when they defrosted the guy and realized that there was brain activity and a heartbeat.

Natasha doesn’t know anything more than that Captain America is alive – he could be a vegetable, he could be brain damaged, he could be paralyzed – but she promises to let him know as soon as she does. Because she knows it’s important to him, she doesn’t need to say. He thanks her, then runs to catch up with his colleagues and have a fabulous sushi dinner before going off to a bar and get drunk off his ass because _holy fuck_. Captain America’s alive.

Clint’s not a fanboy the way Coulson is; his appreciation for Cap comes less from how he used to pretend to be a Howling Commando as a kid (younger brothers never got to be Cap) and more as an adult when he was part of the Commandos’ legacy for real. He did his time in Special Forces and then other parts of Special Ops and that’s where he learned to appreciate Steve Rogers not as the Star Spangled Man but instead as a tactician and a strategist and a fucking brilliant fighter in a brand-new kind of warfare. Forget the war bonds; Captain America was half the reason SOCOM existed at all.

Natasha doesn’t have much more for him by the time he leaves Japan two weeks later; Rogers is still unconscious, in a “light coma” that Clint mocks because being in a coma is like being pregnant, you can’t be a little bit of either. By the time he gets back Stateside, which required a detour to fucking Calcutta, Rogers has been transferred to a special ward made up in the semi-secret office space off Times Square. (Because where else but the Crossroads of the World are you going to put your super-secret spy base?)

Clint knows this officially because Coulson’s got a really messed up assignment for him – get dressed up in Army duds from World War II and be ready to pretend like it’s still 1945 in case Rogers wakes up. He gets this assignment because he was actually in the Army long enough to fake like he’s still in it. “Technically, I still am,” he reminds Coulson.

“Fix your hair,” Coulson replies, ignoring him. “We’ll get you some brilliantine.”

For the record, Clint looks like a derp done up like a doughboy. Thankfully, Ramirez is wandering around in a WAC outfit that’s got to be at least a size too small in the shirt and nobody is even looking at Clint’s hair because even the straight women are staring at Ramirez’s rack.

Clint tells Captain America that he’s missing something wonderful when he goes in to adjust the fake window.

In the flesh, Steve Rogers looks young and vulnerable despite the fact that he’s cut like a fucking diamond. He doesn’t look like a dynamic leader of men, a cunning warfighter, or a national hero. He looks like a frat boy who’s fallen asleep on his dorm room bed without taking off his shoes. Clint doesn’t know why they put shoes on him, but nobody else has an answer either or wants to take them off because apparently there have been signs that Rogers is surfacing and they don’t want him to wake up to some stranger taking off his shoes.

It’s a somewhat ironic statement considering what does happen when Rogers wakes up. Clint’s half-dressed when Rogers makes a break for it, changing back into his street clothes fifteen stories upstairs. He goes out into the hallway to watch the street below, but he can’t really see anything, just hear the screech of brakes and honking horns. He goes back into the locker room to shower and get the brilliantine out of his hair and put it back into some semblance of acceptable. He’s dressed and pulling on his boots when one of the agents still done up in period clothes tells him that Fury needs him downstairs now.

“If he wants me to put an arrow in Captain America, I am fucking quitting,” Clint announces to all as he gets in the elevator.

Fury doesn’t want him to put an arrow in Captain America. He wants Clint to _keep Captain America company_ for a while until they can get the support team in place. Poor Rogers; his introduction to the twenty-first century’s going to be at the hands of headshrinkers.

Steve Rogers awake is not a frat boy. He’s Captain America, albeit a pretty stunned one. Alert, aware, eyeing the exits and how fast he can get to them, and sizing up Clint from the moment he crosses the threshold of the office they’re holding him in until they can find some place “more comfortable.”

The guy’s just woken up to find out he’s seventy years out of time and everything he’s ever known and loved is gone. There is no place that’s comfortable, Clint doesn’t reply.  

“What’s going on, sir?” Cap asks when Clint does nothing more than pause by the door and case the room.

“Don’t ‘sir’ me, I work for a living,” Clint retorts. It comes out automatically because that’s what he says to all of the probie agents who make that mistake. It takes him a heartbeat to realize he’s just sassed Captain America.

But Cap doesn’t take offense. He smiles instead and Clint tries to ignore the gratitude for something familiar that is in the other man’s eyes. “My apologies… technical sergeant?”

“Master sergeant once upon a time,” Clint allows, holding out his hand in greeting. “But it’s mostly ‘agent’ these days except when the Army expects me to show up for a PFT.”

Captain America shakes his hand and Clint reminds himself that now is not the moment to get starstruck.

They sit in companionable silence because it’s pretty obvious that Cap doesn’t know where to begin asking questions and Clint doesn’t know where to start with the answers. But he does notice Cap eyeing the plasma monitor on the wall.

“It’s a television,” Clint tells him, then realized that he doesn’t even know if that means anything to Cap. But Cap turns back to him with a look of awe and surprise.

“It’s so big and so thin,” he marvels. “But where are the controls?”

Clint looks around for a remote but can’t find one. “It’s probably in a drawer somewhere. It also probably has too many buttons for me to figure out how it works. When Fury gets back, he’ll get someone to show it to you.”

But when Fury gets back, there’s too much to do and there is no introduction to television. Or a chance for Clint to do much more than wave farewell to a shepherded-along Captain America who is still holding himself like he still believes there’s a chance that he’s simply a POW in a very fancy HYDRA prison in his own time. Or maybe he just hopes he is.

“I shook Captain America’s hand today,” Clint tells Natasha over the phone. She’s somewhere in Southeast Asia and he has woken her up to tell her this. “I don’t think I quite believe that happened.”

Natasha makes a noise that could be a snort or possibly a snore.

“It’s more of a thing than I thought it would be,” Clint admits. “Meeting him for real.”

This time, Natasha laughs, but not at him. Or, well, not all at him.

He doesn’t see Cap again for months; he’s off doing crazy things – even by SHIELD standards – in Kyrgyzstan and then he winds up in Kabul and then he finally gets to come back to the States, but that’s just going from running around on top of a mountain to running around beneath it because he’s supposed to be trying out some advanced tracking tech and they want to use it underground.

Which is why he’s there when Loki arrives and everything goes to hell and no, Clint will not talk about it to the headshrinkers and Coulson can’t get him out of it because Coulson’s _dead_ and Natasha can only do so much on top of already saving him from himself. (She won’t say that they’re even because she doesn’t think along those lines. He doesn’t, either. They’ll be able to joke about it all some day, but he can’t imagine when that day will be.)

The next time he sees Captain America, it’s in the hospital-room-cum-prison-cell he’s spending all of his time in. The door opens and Cap fills the open space and it’s totally a trick of the lighting and his costume material that he’s got a glow.

“Let’s go, Master Sergeant, it’s time to go to work.”


End file.
